Did you ever wish that your WordPress, plugins and themes were updated automatically while you sleep? We are not talking about the one-click update all feature that we already have in ManageWP, but true automatic continuous updates without any action required from the user.
We are happy to announce that ManageWP continues to innovate and we are launching this amazing feature with this Worker update!
This is an experimental feature and will work only for updating the Worker plugin and for limited number of users only. But if everything goes as planned we will roll this out for everyone.
Of course, it will be fully customizable. You will be able to select what do you want automatically upgraded. For example core WordPress files on only select websites, or just certain plugin and themes. We hope this will make managing WordPress sites even easier in the future.
matthewlking
Is this available for self hosted yet?
ManageWP
Not yet, we are polishing the feature – stay tuned.
seogary
We’d need to try it on a test blog first, then run a test to confirm the site’s still working, before doing the same on the rest of the blogs. Also need some way to recover the sites in bulk if it all goes Error 500.
ericshefferman
I have long thought that WordPress should automatically be upgrading itself since
1- the software does know that there is an upgrade available
2- all that’s involved in upgrading now is clicking a button
I really have to show up to click the button?
I feel like George Jetson complaining about how hard his job is, however the idea of having to update sites at any time day or night there is an upgrade made available is like becoming an indentured servant to WordPress.
Yet the alternative is what happened a few years ago – I didn’t upgrade for a day or two and my site got hacked and all the power users on the WordPress boards were blaming everyone who got hacked rather than helping them recover their sites.
I’ve never had any problems from doing an update that were as bad as trying to remove all instances of whatever that was from my hosting account — remvb virus or something.
Tom Ewer
Hi Eric,
Upgrades can lead to incompatibility issues with plugins and other such things. There would be uproar if WordPress started enforcing automatic updates.
Cheers,
Tom
ManageWP
We’ll try to make it as safe as possible with as many configurable options as possible.
sandie
Will it be possible for it to create an automatic backup before it updates a site? Sorry to appear negative, it’s great that you’re inovating, but I’m struggling to see why anyone would use it without automatic backups.
ManageWP
Yes it will be possible.
John
+1 for Automatic backups before the update… its rare for things to break but it does happen.
straitline
I don’t see any evidence of this in my account after upgrading, I take it that means I haven’t received access to it yet?
I need to be absolutely sure that this isn’t active, there are serious reasons not to automatically update on live sites (as noted by previous commentators).
Will it be clear how to turn this on and off when the final version is released?
ManageWP
It is enabled only for limited number of users (opted in) and only for Worker plugin updates. Do not worry, the feature will be turned off by default when it’s rolled out for everyone.
Steve wyman
Hi
Im in favor of innovation and its great to see these ideas being developed (BTW is the ipad version progressing!)
But auto updating can be very problematic. For example 20% of my sites crashed when wordpress did an update about 3 months ago. I restored backups and worked through the issues (plugins surprise surprise).
So yes we’ll need the ability to only auto update certain things. I would not want to update themes or core wordpress files automatically as I;d want to test them first.
But auto update the plugins sounds great.
Can we have an immediate (rather than time delayed) email when the system does an auto update?
Other wise if traffic drops or earning it may take some time to work out what or which update caused the issue.
thanks
SiteSubscribe
Sounds like a great feature.
Only thing is I’d be concerned if something stopped working after an update (which sometimes happens)…will there be an ‘update log’ available within the WP Manage dashboard so that if something goes wrong we can look at what changed in order to fix it? (i.e. which plugin update broke the site)
In a perfect world, it would be awesome to even be able to roll back isolated plugin updates, maybe something like how ‘Easy Theme and Plugin Upgrades’ plugin works.